Idea Surplus Disorder #81

Welcome to Idea Surplus Disorder.

In this week's edition, art appreciation, beginning ahead, AI crutches, tips for reluctant speakers, managing academics, bygone bowling alleys, best puns, horror movies, work physics, and more.

I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!

Ideas + Insights

I'll spend my next visit to an art museum differently after reading Bianca Bosker's Rules for Art Museums:

1. You don’t have to look at everything.
2. You do have to look at something for at least five minutes.
3. Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text— that is the paragraph-long explanation pasted on the wall beside many of the artworks (at least until after you've looked at the art).

I've been starting my days like I'm already ahead for a week now, and it makes my mornings feel a bit more settled:

What if you worked on the basis that you began each day at zero balance, so that everything you accomplished – every task you got done, every tiny thing you did to address the world's troubles, or the needs of your household – put you ever further into the black? What if – and personally I find this thought almost unthinkable in is radicalism, but still, here goes – what if there's nothing you ever have to do to earn your spot on the planet? What if everything you actually get around to doing, on any given day, is in some important sense surplus to minimum requirements?

The Ivy Lee method is a simple productivity hack that has a cool backstory:

• Before you end your day, write down the 6 most important tasks you need to complete the next day. Limit yourself to just six tasks. Not one more.
• Rank the 6 tasks in order of importance, from most to least important.
• The next day, start with the first task and don’t stop until it’s done. Put aside any distractions and leave the unexpected for later.
• Continue with the rest of the tasks following the same procedure. Work on one task at a time, in order of priority and if possible, take breaks between tasks and don’t do tasks halfway. When you finish a task, you can review the order of priority to see if it has changed with the unexpected.
• Any tasks you haven’t completed are carried over to the next day, and added back to the list of 6 tasks. If you tend to leave tasks undone, adjust your workload so that the 6 tasks are manageable in one day.

Students who use AI as a crutch don't learn anything.

Get more sleep:

"Even moderate sleep deprivation (6 hours per night for 2 weeks) led to cognitive performance deficits equivalent to two full nights of total sleep deprivation.” Getting little sleep leads to a decline in cognitive skills during the day — from attention, to working memory, even processing speed.

Mark Manson has learned some things:

• If You’re Not Turning Down Things That Excite You, Then You’re Not Focused Enough on What Matters
• You Give Power to Who You Blame
• If You Have to Tell Someone You’re That, Then You’re Not That
• If You Can’t Say No, Then Your Yeses Mean Nothing

Feeling like you're running in quicksand at work? This Sludge Tax Calculator helps put a price on organizational inefficiency.

Sludge, a term popularised by Nobel laureate Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, refers to the bureaucratic inefficiencies and unnecessary obstacles within an organisation that hinder decision-making, innovation and reinvention. Use the tool above to calculate your ‘sludge tax’: the time and money organisational friction is costing you and your company.

Strong Opinions Weakly Held:

Allow your intuition to guide you to a conclusion, no matter how imperfect — this is the ‘strong opinion’ part. Then –and this is the ‘weakly held’ part– prove yourself wrong. Engage in creative doubt. Look for information that doesn’t fit, or indicators that pointing in an entirely different direction.

Eventually your intuition will kick in and a new hypothesis will emerge out of the rubble, ready to be ruthlessly torn apart once again. You will be surprised by how quickly the sequence of faulty forecasts will deliver you to a useful result.

If you're a reluctant public speaker, here's a simple speaking tip:

Think up: When gathering your thoughts, resist the urge to look down. Instead, practice looking up and maintaining eye contact with your audience. This simple shift will not only make you appear more confident but will also help you think more clearly. Put a sticky note with “Think Up” on your computer as a reminder.

This is management genius from a former business school dean:

When a professor came to me to complain about a fellow professor, I would jump out of my seat and cheerily ask my Dean’s EA, Kathryn, to call the fellow professor to say that the complaining professor and I would be coming to their office to discuss a matter. Without fail, the complaining professor would protest and tell Kathryn that it wouldn’t be necessary and would go off and solve the problem directly and without me. Basically, I spoiled the fun of the complaining professors who wanted to be able to unload on their colleague without that colleague having the opportunity of self-defense.

There's a place for everyone, and we all benefit when someone finds theirs:

When people fail to find their niche, and when we fail to help them find it, we don’t just suffer from their absence. We also suffer from their presence in the wrong place. People often end up doing awful things because they never figured out what else to do. Nobody is born with a hankering to build prisons or raid pensions or market vapes to kids—their Plinko chips got jammed in an evil slot because they never landed in a good one.

That’s why “where do I fit in?” is not a private question, like the password to your bank account or the color of your underwear. We all have a stake in you finding your place, because we’re all better off when you like your life. Well-slotted people make good neighbors, bosses, partners, and parents. Unmoored, detached, disaffected people end up trying to figure out whether 10-year-olds prefer vapes that taste like cotton candy or blue raspberry.

The Destructo Ad Absurdum test:

If a technology were to vanish overnight, how many people outside that field would be profoundly affected?

Want a creative icebreaker exercise for your team before you begin your annual planning? Reverse-engineer a competitor's strategy:

Focus the team on how it could take the most interesting insights from reverse-engineering its most admired competitor in a new and different direction for its own competitive advantage. That will get the team chomping at the bit to dive into its own strategy — with a little practice under its belt!

Fun Finds

• Bygone Bowling Alleys
• The Worst (Best?) Puns Ever
• Comedic Wildlife Photos
• Work Physics
• Finding things on eBay
• The 100 Best (Scariest?) Horror Movies of All Time

Words of Wisdom

"The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence." – Jiddu Krishnamurti

“The opposite of sensitive is not brave. It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s no badge of honor.” – Glenan Doyle

“If something is always like something else, it is never truly itself." – Johnathan Meades

"Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer." – Timothy Ferriss

"Curiosity is unlike most other appetites: indulging it tends to increase rather than to sate it. " – Paul Graham

"Nothing Meaningful in Life Is Easy, Nothing Easy in Life Is Meaningful" – Mark Manson

"You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair." – Chinese Proverb

"Learning is experience. Everything else is just information." – Albert Einstein

“The way we spend our time defines who we are.” – Jonathan Estrin.